Balzac

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Balzac as the figure of the realism that follows Romanticism, alongside Stendhal and Flaubert. He often returns to one feature of the modern novel: even before the plot begins, Balzac describes everything on the mantelpiece, the individual in his here and now1. This realism is not naive: Balzac has vision and not merely sight, and he speaks of the object rather than of the self. Like Marx, who preferred him to Zola, he holds that this royalist better expresses the class struggle, through the middle strata that emerged from the Revolution and thirst for success2. He reads Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues and Le Lys dans la vallée closely, the last being a book where this scarcely lyrical novelist allows himself some autumnal melancholy3, and he also reads Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées. Finally, he calls Clouscard's Le Capitalisme de la séduction the Comédie humaine of the last forty years4.

1. 1#9 Romantic irony and the Vinteuil sonata15 Jan 2021 · 16:32
2. 2Money, work, freedom3 Aug 2019 · 26:56
3. 3#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 1:05:22
4. 4Radio Galère: Michel Clouscard (1)6 Jul 2012 · 47:22

Summary produced automatically from 52 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.